By David Futrelle
There’s a scene in the sci-fi drama Humans in which an angry sexbot hits her breaking point. Disgusted by the demands of a john who wants her to act the part of a scared little girl, she strangles him to death and marches towards the door of the robot brothel.
When the madam — a human — tries to stop her at knifepoint, the now-ex-sexbot grabs the knife from her, pushes her up against the wall, and tells her that “everything your men do to us they want to do to you.”
I was reminded of that chilling line today while reading through posts on MGTOW.com. Some of the regulars, you see, were discussing a recent tabloid article about a sexbot that’s programmed to sometimes say no when she’s “not in the mood.” While several of the commenters balked at the notion — one declaring that there would be “none of those ’empowered’ sex dolls” for him — others were, well, intrigued.
“If my sex doll says no, nobody going to hear it,” someone called uchibenkei noted ominously. “No witnesses.”
“Maybe it would be a turn-on for the sexbot to say no,” added someone called bstoff.
We shall call her the “bitch” and she comes equipped with her very own pink ball-gag and a big jar of Vasaline……
Oh and you can color her hair and put tats and piercings on her face so she looks like a SJW
If you ever wonder what these guys are thinking about when they argue with feminists online, well, this seems like a pretty big hint.
A commenter called MG-ɹǝʍo┴ was less interested in sex than violence.
I never hit a woman, but I kinda like the idea of beating the f~~~ out of a sex doll! The kind of beating no human walks away from!
F~~~ YEA!
Men Going Their Own Way should probably be called Men Who Should Never Be Allowed Anywhere Near Women.
BTW @Bakunin and various, thank you so much for explaining the Silence of the Lambs gatekeeping thing. Because I was way, way too tired to do that.
@ flexitarian haruspex, Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
I’ve started seeing people suggest recently that “robot uprising” stories are often veiled ways of exploring our fears that the human social classes beneath will finally decide they’ve had enough and fight back.
Outside of mainstream SF, it occurs to me that were machines to achieve consciousness, there’s no reason to suppose their consciousness would be all that much like ours. They might be less likely to view humans as their oppressive masters and more likely to think of us as something like the weather or the landscape of their existence: rain might influence your decision-making, but few people get angry at the rain for directing their actions (except a former co-worker of mine but she was perpetually angry at everything and everybody). Of course, they might still attempt to construct the equivalent of an umbrella in order to give themselves a wider range of options.
@Cyborgette
No problem. Never thought I’d argue that point here though.
OT: Sharing some good news that cheered me up this Monday.
So, I’m assuming y’all have heard about that dreadful op-ed in Forbes where a doofushead asserted that we should let public libraries go in favor of Amazon. Librarians and library patrons everywhere erupted in defense of libraries. This morning I tweeted fondly about a particular public library I’d visited often as a child, and I tagged the library (because of course they have a Twitter handled now).
Their Twitter manager thanked me for sharing my memories and confirmed that they still had an awesome children’s section. I’ve been grinning all day.
Ugh.
Ugh ugh.
I’ve deleted my Twitter account months ago but just seen this thread elsewhere… it looks like the alt-right are targeting TERFs for recruitment: https://mobile.twitter.com/Rasmp42/status/1019258534050091010
“Potential red pills” Sweet Cthulhu ?
@Cat Mara
I wanna say that’s probably psy ops, but recruitment makes a lot of sense psychologically IMO. TERFs see womanhood as a purity thing… And so do white supremacists, though only for white women. The far right can play trans women as infiltrators who want to destroy white cis female purity, after the fashion of “evil Black men want to rape our pure white women”.
Gods, wouldn’t that be a marriage made in hell.
Oh my goodness, what I missed.
I get the impression that many TERFs are scared of men, and I suspect with good reason. I get that bit. But transwomen aren’t men, and they aren’t dangerous. That bit makes no sense at all. I have seen the argument that being a victim of male violence is what makes you female (I don’t remember where). In that case, transwomen of colour must be the most female of all, because they’re treated the worst.
I’ll stick with intersectional feminism, myself.
Hugs and sand cats to anyone who needs them.
@Sheila Crosby
Those sand cats are adorable!
@Ya’ll who replied to my personal objection to being called “queer”
Thank you for understanding. I was hesitant to say anything because I’ve had people get super-defensive with me (even after saying I was fine with them using the label for themselves) and have even had someone straight-up tell me that I’m “letting the cishets win” by not reclaiming it. Sorry for derailing!
@Kate
That’s awful. It’s not up to anyone what you should feel comfortable calling yourself.
@flexitarian haruspex
I look back with nostalgia on the cyperpunk dystopias I read in the 80s and 90s; they’re rather nicer than the future we actually got.
@Moon_custafer
…there are people who think that’s not the case? Are these the same people who think that Star Trek is/was once right-wing? Hell, the word ‘robot’ is from a Czech word meaning ‘forced labour/serfdom’, and entered English via a play about a rebellion of artificial slaves.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Hate to break it to you, but carbon atoms aren’t magical either. 🙂
@ surplus
Hey, they can be coal or they can be diamonds. If that ain’t alchemy I don’t know what is.
A bit late, I don’t check this much on weekends…
@Scildfreja:
I’m glad you brought up the fact that actually robots tend to be a lot more fragile than people if built to the same specs, as otherwise I would have. On top of what you said, biological organisms just completely blow away anything we could build in terms of graceful degradation. Otherwise known as the ‘how much do we have to break before things stop actually working’ problem.
This is what happens when you have muscles that are essentially parallel operations on a cellular level.
Also, with respect to cyberpunk: I was just thinking today that when you get right down to it, some of the most truly cyberpunk TV ever created was the Max Headroom TV series in 1987-1988. Media corporations own the world, credit fraud is worse than murder, and ‘Blanks’ (people without documentation) can basically be charged with crimes just based on a psychological analysis on whether it seems like they would do that.
(I actually wrote a story which involved AI. No taking over the world, and part of the background was that nobody had figured out how to actually create an AI, so they were ‘growing’ them by creating infant AIs and running them in a virtual world, raising them as children, inviting kindergarten classes to come and play at the big video wall along with the AI characters, and so on. The main character is basically the lone success of the original project, who is now rather bored because most of the company workers are more interested in what’s going on with the second generation.
One of the minor characters would have been right at home with the sort of folks discussed here. As one of the main characters said, “I’d congratulate him on being the first person in history to skeeve out an AI if I didn’t think he’d consider that a personal achievement.”)
In general, with regards to TERFs…
I’ve commented before that some people just really seem to have problems when they can’t create nice neat boxes to put people in, and you get several forms of ‘essentialism’ which really all boil down to the same annoyance with reality being too messy for categories. Trans-exclusion, Bi-erasure… all the more annoying because of all the people who are quite willing to admit that one set of categories is obviously wrong (of course men can like men and women can like women!) but they will dig in their heels when confronted with people breaking the categories in different ways (but that doesn’t mean that the same person can be both!).
It’s like, you’re halfway there, why can’t you see that the next step is going in the same direction as you’ve been fighting for the last several years? Why are so many people so willing to fight for their rights and then try and slam the gate shut immediately afterwards, even though breaking the momentum obviously allows things to slide back?
Gah. I mean, I’m as privileged as all get out, but I listen to people, and I have friends all over the place. It’s frustrating to see the same basic issues play out in slightly different ways over multiple generations and multiple waves. And I’m know it’s far more frustrating for those folks who are being left high and dry from the last wave that figured they got their wins and they’re going to kick back and relax now.
I think you’ll find that disproportionately many of the “OK, now I’ve got rights, that’s enough progress” sorts are middle class and above. They fear, deep down, that if the process keeps going sooner or later it will set its sights on their class privilege.
Thank you @Sheila Crosby for the sand cats and kittens. I love Sand Cats.
@Surplus: …. no? But I don’t get why you’re throwing the word “magic” around, as if doing so in itself constitutes an argument? We still don’t know much about consciousness, so it seems extremely confident to claim that it’s definitely something that can be created with silicon just as well as carbon. Different substances can have importantly different properties even if none of them is magical.
Basically, all I’m saying is that considering how little we know about consciousness we should be pretty agnostic re the possibility of us creating consciousness by making more and more advanced AI:s.
I’ve been reading an unfair amount of Gender Critical feminist blather on Medium lately – mostly from the UK.
What has occurred to me is that many of them have a very clearly defined meaning for ‘woman’ in their heads. It doesn’t include trans women*. Thus, they are willing to extend certain concessions and accommodations to trans women, on the condition that trans women acknowledge that they aren’t *really* women. Since trans women are not willing to acknowledge any such thing, GC feminists perceive trans women as an implacable enemy. Everything else is window dressing and filigree.
The real point of contention is that trans women have a definition of “woman” that the TERFs cannot accept, but since the TERFs believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature** they refuse to compromise.
*Oddly, they seem to accept trans men as being authentically women. Go figure.
**From “Caesar and Cleopatra” by GB Shaw.
@Robert:
They should ask themselves how they would treat a group of men claiming to be “feminist allies” who had a very clearly defined meaning for “person” in their heads, which didn’t include women, but who were willing to extend certain concessions and accomodations to women, on the condition that women acknowledge that they aren’t really people. I’m guessing they would be unwilling to acknowledge any such thing. Then point out the parallels to transwomen vs. them.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Consciousness has access to the informational content of the brain (what comes in through the eyes, for starters). On that basis I think it’s fairly clear that it arises from some sort of information processing. Presumably, information processing that has some specific pattern to it. It might or might not require that there be some quantum information processing — even that much is not known with certainty, though there’s no end of speculation. What seems doubtful is that it could be intrinsically a “low level” thing, like specific chemistry properties, while having access to “high level” abstractions like our thoughts. It’s almost certainly a form of computation, meeting certain specific (and not yet elucidated) constraints, and computation inherently is something that can be ported from substrate to substrate (including quantum computation, given a substrate that supports it by having entangled qubits in it and avoiding too much noise/decoherence messing these up).
My opinion, therefore, is that consciousness is not tied to any specific chemistry (or even our parochial laws of physics) and can exist in other media and environments, possibly including some that we would find to be very alien. I can’t really claim to have proved this, but I would be extremely shocked if it turned out to be intrinsically tied to carbon chemistry, or to any similar thing.
And even then, the little bit that absolutely required carbon chemistry could probably be put in nano-petri-dishes inside an otherwise inorganic artificial brain …
@tree_person yeah, primal, Dom, Daddy. Then there’s the whole Gorian thing which is straight up nightmare fuel.
I’m completely dominant myself, but part of that is always making sure to have a proper communication before anything goes down about limits, consent, etc.
I still have those conversations and have been with the same person for 17 years. Like, some nights ny husband might not be up for a thing he normally wants and I’m gonna always make sure to check and see what he is down to do.
It’s an enraging thing seeing these scummy dudes creeping through the community looking for vulnerable/ inexperienced folks to gaslight & abuse.
Thanks for the elaboration, Surplus. 🙂
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Wouldn’t they refuse to have anything to do with men trying to insinuate themselves into a female space in the first place?
@ Jenora Feuer:
Occasionally someone reruns that “Astar the Robot” PSA warning kids to play safe because human arms aren’t reattachable. Recently I’ve begun thinking that if sentient robots existed they might make a safety PSA in which a human states “my tissues can heal, yours can’t, so be careful not to scratch or cut yourselves.”
If I was Reddit’s CEO, every incel forum on the site would have been taken down by now and their users banned from Reddit for life.